“Surly Amy” Roth, a Los Angeles artist and writer for Skepchick, has created an art installation that attempts to capture and convey what it feels like to be on the receiving end of the relentless abuse she and too many other outspoken women face online.
With the help of members of the Los Angeles Women’s Atheist and Agnostic Group, Roth has built a small office-within-an-office inside the The Center For Inquiry-Los Angeles – and covered every surface with printouts of actual harassing messages sent to her and an assortment of other misogynist bete noires, including Rebecca Watson, Amanda Marcotte, Soraya Chemaly and Lindy West.
As she writes,
There is a false notion that online spaces are not real. That what happens online does not have an effect on the regular day-to-day life of people. As we have seen recently with the stolen photos of Jennifer Lawrence, high profile women are seen as mere objects and targets or play-things meant to be stolen, acquired and used- that if they can not handle these made up rules- that they should leave the internet and all forms of technology behind.
My art exhibit is meant to put you, the viewer, in their shoes if only for a moment. See what it is like to be obsessively judged based on “fuck-ability”, “rape-ability”, as an object, or alternatively as what seems to be a target in a socially accepted (or otherwise ignored) game of online stalking, harassment and silencing techniques.
The opening reception for “A Woman’s Room Online” is tonight, September 13th at 7pm at the Center for Inquiry in Los Angeles; the installation will remain up through Oct. 13th.
You can read more about it here.
Sadly, I doubt this will have an impact on the people who most need to hear this message. The folks who issue this abuse take a sticks-and-stones position, when they bother to acknowledge the humanity of their victims at all.
Nevertheless it is a great idea, and I hope it does have an impact on the bystanders who enable the abusers to get away with it.
What a great idea for an exhibit. 😀 I wish her all the luck with it and hope it reaches some of the people who really need to hear this. I’m not overly optimistic, but still.
Policy, I think most if not all of the abusers are past the point of no return. But hopefully this will make bystanders and fence-sitters realize just what women online have to put up with.
PoM, agreed. I doubt that this’ll change the minds of the manospherians, but hopefully, it’ll sway people who just aren’t aware of how bad the harassment can get and who are skeptical of feminism and ideas associated with feminism because of negative portrayals of feminism.
Eh, I’m cynical. If most of the people who act like the harassment of women online is no big deal cared enough to change as a result of this they’d already have changed, because the information about how common this is has been out there for a long time, and if they know any women at all they’ve heard someone complaining about it. Maybe if a man put together the exhibit and called it A Manly Man Who’s Totally Manly Says That Women Really Are Harassed A Lot they might listen, or they might just call him a white knight and go back to posting watm comments on some poor irritated woman’s Facebook.
Regardless of its effectiveness in getting through to MRAs it’s a striking bit of art. We really need more of this sort of thing.
This is the judge that David reported on a few months ago.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/12/us/arkansas-judge/index.html?c=homepage-t
I think there are a lot of people out there who don’t really realize just how bad it is; this exhibit might reach some of them and get the point across in a visceral way. I mean, I’ve been on the internet since the 90s, and I didn’t really “get it” until I got a taste of this sort of harassment after starting this blog.
Phil Plait of the Bad Astronomy blog (and a personal friend of Amy’s) blogged about this at http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/09/10/amy_davis_roth_turning_misogyny_into_art.html
Warning: comments on Slate are not moderated and contain a massive influx of people like Sara Mayhew who have raised personal vendettas against Amy and Skepchick to an artform of their own.
I helped work on the exhibit and I’m going to the opening tonight. Is anyone else going? I can let you all know how it went!
The problem is that this is some exhibit in some building in some place in the US. It won’t reach even an insigificant number of people this way.
This would probably been have better off as a spambot folks can sign up to or a mailing list redistributing these mails to people who’re fencesitters because they feel that THEY could deal with the barrage of abuses, no problem.
I’m throwing my hat in the ring for the idea that the people who are most likely to finally”get it” are not going to be the dyed-in-the-wool partisans but those in the Great Undecided Middle (i.e., David’s people-out-there). I’m not sure that anything would convince the Manosphere that any serious problems that women face are serious–or even problems. The exhibit seems like thoughtful public outreach or–horrors!–public relations, but, as many posters here are keen to point out, public relations is for the general public, not partisans; it’s for raising public awareness, not–for lack of imagination in analogies–raising a private army.
Kakanian,
That’s a really good idea. It would probably be like that story that went viral several months ago. A guy was convinced women had it so easy online dating and all the laments about creepers were exaggerations. He made a fake profile as a woman using a friend’s picture (fortunately with her permission). He lasted a few hours before shutting down his fake female profile because he couldn’t handle the flood of men saying creepy things and/or sending dick pics.
I dunno…perhaps it is the only way, but I feel very powerless when there’s genuinely nothing that can be done about this apart from ‘let’s show it everywhere so that society at large get how prevalent this is’.
Though embedding it in the legal system has its own problems (MRA-sympathetic judges/police might strive for ‘balance’, muh freedom of speech, etc.)
Attempting to create call-out culture on those in the middle ground that aren’t dyed-in-the-wool MRAs doesn’t seem to work either, because everyone gets so defensive about their own mistakes…
Sorry for the ellipses. I’m using them to signify throwing out half-baked ideas, feel free to shoot them down at will.
@ g2-18747da0b5b9c708ebcd3c66ef5d3a77 – Thanks for the link!
Loved this line, in particular; “These comments are not a reflection of who I am”. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!! If our words and deeds do not reflect who we are, then what the Hell does?
Wrong thread, but that should be on the Bingo card! “sure I said [horrible thing], but I’m a good person on the inside”.
Completely OT: Hoff Sommers on Time http://time.com/3222543/5-feminist-myths-that-will-not-die/ Normally I don’t bother with her, but someone posted it in a facebook feminist group as if it was legit criticism.
I can’t go tonight, but I’ll try to get there before it closes, just to show my support.
I helped work on the installation. I’m also a long-time volunteer at CFI-Los Angeles, and I can attest that three (3) men who worked there had no idea how bad the abuse is until they saw the stuff (page after page after page of printouts of hate) that we’re working with.
There’s a cognitive bias called Curse of Knowledge that makes it difficult for people to see things they understand from the perspective of people who have less understanding. I notice it in myself a lot.
But the fact is that most people don’t follow the news about the harassment women get very closely. They probably know they get some, but then any outspoken person online gets some. They don’t realize the extent of it, or the misogyny that gets expressed.
Anyway, whether we open a few eyes or lots of them, Amy and we’ve created something pretty cool out of all that hatred.
If you’re in the area, I hope you’ll come see the show. And attend the opening if you can–I can guarantee that the more people show up, the more it will piss off the haters. They’ve been throwing glorious fits on the Facebook event pages
I support them all the way and hope it will reach a lot of people
WWTH
I read about that too. I think misognists should pretend to be a woman but one at a time because if they all do it they won’t experience it.
Grumpyoldnurse
Wouldn’t that fit under “Nice Guy/Girl”
Pollydactyl, Lady Mondegreen, I really hope it’ll be a huge success and that you both can be proud you were a part of it. 🙂 That curse of knowledge thing I’d quite interesting, I think I’ve seen it a little with GamerGate as well – yeah the dudebros have had support but quite a few people I would not have pegged as feminists have gone “wtf is it really this awful?”
Aitch-Thank you very much! I’m already proud to have participated.
Lady Mondegren-I’ll look for you at the opening!
Thank you, Aitch!
See ya tonight, pollydactyl. I’ll be there early. 🙂
(lol, autocorrect doesn’t approve of pollydactyl’s nym!)
@ fruitloopsie – I guess you’re right, it’s just a very special example of nice guyism. Feel free to disallow for redundancy!
To everyone who participated in the installation – You ROCK! Best wishes.
Kind of painfully ironic how you worded this, since at least 50% of people are women, many of whom will know how much women are harassed online via personal experience. It’s amazing how embedded the man=norm bias is in terms of framing.
I haven’t heard of that cognitive bias before.
…Suddenly, people not making much sense to me makes a lot more sense.